Another Perspective

Memory
of a Free Festival

By Brian Roberts

Something peculiar about the sand on the beach of Florence, Oregon makes a
steady midwinter rain seem not bone-chillingly cold, but rather warm and
relaxing, when one is experiencing the after-affects of having ingested a
quarter pound of psylocibic mushrooms. If one were to bank on this
observation, to turn it into some sort of platitude, one might find it to
be erroneous, and wish that one had brought more than a swimming suit and
towel on the adventure. Indeed, midwinter might seem like a curious time
for a trip to the beach in the first place--but perhaps the reader fails
to take into account the desperate measures to which first-year dormrats
are willing to go, the lengths to which they are likely to transgress upon
common sense and decency, when they are too young to entertain themselves
by collectively taking up a weekend residence at some university area
drinking establishment.

Seamus and Moon Unit* were pretty certain that the beach was the proper
place to eat our fun stuff and go bonkers. "The beach it's pretty chill,
brah," Moon-Unit assured me as he twisted a strand of hair in his fingers
and bobbed it absentmindedly against his thumb. A habit of his. Concern
tugged at my eyebrows as I protested: "If it's chilly won't that cause us
to have a bad trip?" "Moon Unit means that the scene will be mellow and
nobody will bother us," Seamus clarified as he handed me his specially
engineered toilet paper roll and a bong, stepping away from the window. He
has a way of clearing the air.

So we went west, the three of us, in my
miraculously-still-functional-after-all-its-abuses blue Chevy Sprint. The
definition of ordinary, that car-aside from the fact that someone had
stolen the blade of one windshield wiper, and rather than replacing it I
had simply left its arm turned upwards to wave when the other one was
wiping. We found some bagels at a convenience store conveniently located
on what seemed to be the edge of something or other, and we stuffed our
fungus into them as we pretended to appreciate the Jerry Garcia/David
Grisman bootleg Moon-Unit had brought along. Here we were trying to
celebrate our youth by listening to a poor recording of tired old men
perform stripped down versions of used-up songs: an omen, perhaps. We were
trying to live an ideal, to be doing the thing that people who were us
would do, to peek over into that alternate universe in which people never
have to question their identities and mimic our mirror-selves' movements,
but we were hitting the note a bit flat somehow, and I think we knew it
then. Or maybe it was just me.

This trip west had begun in Tennessee, really, over a year prior, when I
read my roommate's copy of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. I was
attending a school far smaller than UO, one with puritanically
gender-segregated dormitories and church-attendance requirements. That
book's admonition to "live your own movie" seemed to shatter all my
previous horizons, leaving a Day-Glo sunset in their wake. It was like an
oracle had told me, "have fun at all costs, or be dead to yourself." I
wanted every moment to be exactly the moment it was born to be; I wanted
every place I went to be the ultimate scene. I thought that if Ken Kesey
with his traveling bus of Pranksters had recreated and redefined the
epitome of beyond-trendy bohemia that comes to mind when one thinks of
Hemingway's clique of expatriates in Paris, then such was a potential feat
for anyone who has that thing Hunter S. Thompson calls "true American
grit." And I thought that if I went to Kesey's alma mater I might stock up
on that kind of grit. But instead of living my own movie I find myself,
with increasing frequency, asking the following question: Just who the
hell is really in charge of this half-ass production? Whose
postmodern-by-default, conscious-of-itself-as-a-narrative,
desperate-for-a-plot vacation slide show is this movie I'm living?

A spirit of optimism, of revelry however subdued, hung over the Blue
Abomination as it perused the parking areas next to a range of Florence's
sand dunes, our stoned faces peering out its windows, hoping to see the
ocean. Between the three of us we determined that there was probably water
on the other side of those dunes, that we had probably been searching for
beach, on the beach itself, for upwards of half an hour. I don't know why
we were surprised, upon finally exiting our clam-baked vehicle, to find we
had the place to ourselves.

We spent the morning in a huddle atop the highest dune as the wind caused
eddies of powdery sand to pummel the fortress we had constructed with our
coats. Expectant of "monster visuals", we were almost disappointed that
the day's most fearsome apparition was an attractive thirtyish
Gor-Tex-clad maiden out for a brisk walk with her benign-if-gargantuan,
fluffy-white canine companion, some thirty feet below us on the shoreline.

The three of us exchanged glances indicative that none of us had been
cognizant of the physical world for an indeterminate unit of time leading
up to that interruption. "This is like... we're communing with our
spirits, ya know, and they're like, One, or something... we're a holy
trinity... I mean, whatever," was Moon-Unit's summary of the collective
trance we weren't yet coming out of. I looked at him quizzically, my
agnostic soul unwilling to refer to itself, until again Seamus introduced
common language: "Dude, whuddup with the guitar and bongos?" So we passed
two instruments between three people, exchanging them every few minutes,
trying not to try to allow the moment to express itself through the medium
of our three bodies, anxiously if euphorically striving to be effortless,
to be doing exactly what we were supposed to be doing.

When the sun finally dipped low enough within the scheme of clouds that
had all day obscured it, there seemed to be a tunnel of sky-cotton candy
paved with hues of orange and purple the likes of which our eyes had never
before had the fortune to know. We were drawn toward it; we bounded down
that dune jubilant as chimps on cocaine. As we reached the surf three
gulls alighted and flew straight into that tunnel of clouds toward the
sun. I don't need to tell you what those birds really were according to
Moon-Unit; more surprisingly, Seamus and I both seemed to go for it. For
another hour we ran exultant along the shore, fully believing that we were
being chased by the foam that flooded in toward us with the tide.

Driving home in the dark and the rain with only one headlight and one
windshield wiper, I was relieved that the whole thing had managed to make
some kind of sense, that the trip had seemed to tell some kind of
story. Still, I wasn't satisfied. I wanted an experience I wouldn't have
to justify with an explanation. When we passed a bicyclist whom we almost
hadn't seen after rounding a corner, I think we all glimpsed ourselves in
an alternate reality in which we'd been driving another foot closer to the
white line and plowed the guy over, the arm of our dysfunctional and
pointing-toward-the-sky-like-a-Norse-figurehead windshield wiper goring
him like a matador. A communal shudder. I wondered if that would have been
a fitting ending.

And we kept it up after that, for a while. I feigned a tranquil poise in
the various nirvanas of psychedelia. Spencer's Butte, The Country Fair,
The Rainbow Gathering. Yet the entire time, as much as I said to myself,
"this is beautiful, this is exactly why people are alive," something kept
throwing out hints that I was only tripping through this scene, to come
out the other side and find another one. The same something that told me I
had damn near impaled a bicyclist on Highway 126.

And now the various scenes, the assorted attitudes, the sundry schools of
entertainment and appearance, the numinous circles of influence that
compose this thing we call the University of Oregon has become the tunnel
through which I trip, in varying degrees of sobriety. I guess I'm supposed
to be able to say something about it when, and if, I find myself on the
other side. To talk about it, I'll meet Seamus and Moon Unit in some
university area drinking establishment tonight, now that we're all of age,
to belly up to the bar and get stupid. That's what we're supposed to be
doing, right?

Bryan Roberts, a senior majoring in English, is a featured columnist for
the Oregon Commentator